Reporting status of Hadoop streaming tasks - sometimes doesn't work

[Leo Alekseyev <dn...@gmail.com>]

After processing a bunch of records via streaming, I report some basic
totals by printing reporter:status:<my report> as per Hadoop Streaming
FAQ.  It works for some reduce tasks, but often one of my reduce tasks
doesn't print my status string but instead displayes something like
"Records r/w=xxxxx/yyyyy > reduce".  I am wondering whether I'm seeing
a bug, or whether I'm doing something wrong, and whether there's an
easy workaround, e.g. an alternative way of returning information from
map/reduce tasks.
Thanks!